Arcades in Japan.

Because real estate is at a serious premium in Tokyo, most of the arcades I visited
were five or six stories tall, each level usually organized by game type.
On the first floor you had the "UFO catcher" cranes, and as you went higher
and higher the games got a little more serious and the eye candy value
dropped accordingly. By the last level, it's just rows and rows of sit-down
multi-button fighting videogames in plastic shells stared at by
glassy-eyed teenagers. We should all meet up and fight each other, videoly.

Sure, you've had contests with your friends over the internet to
see whose dog can type the fastest. But why not eliminate the
middleman! Now with DogStation, it's head-to-head dog typing action!
Now with Dual Anti-Slobber Laser.

This was right around the corner from the Driveway Snow-Shovelling videogame.
The friendly red light and big button on the wall to the right of the machine
is the fire alarm. Boy did I learn that a few times while I was in Japan.

This is a blackjack game with a video of a blackjack dealer. During "attract"
mode when no one's playing it, "she" "looks" around the room in this creepy disembodied
way, because of course she's not actually there. But it wasn't just that, it was that
she did this in total silence. It just made it that much more odd. Might have
been a language thing ("for the international markets, instead of actually finding
someone who speaks Japanese, just have her deal in silence"), might have been a tech thing
("it's cheaper").

It reminded me of the shooting games they had back in the 1970s -- huge curtained
contraptions that would play film clips of a guy walking on top of a train
(for example), and you were supposed to fire your big ole' light-diode rifle
if it turned out he was a bad guy and pulled a gun on you. Then, twenty years
later, someone came out with a similar game called Mad Dog MacRee.

Now, ten years after that, here we are. You can see how popular these types of
games are.